The following three chapters seek to situate the dramatic emergence of modern South Asian liberal and radical thought between 1800 and 1850 in a wider British, European and American context, so further developing the notion of a global or trans-regional sphere of intellectual history. The terms of debate were set by India’s conquest by alien powers and its absorption, on unequal terms, into the world system now dominated by Europe. But the specific forms of its emerging liberal thought were determined by the manner in which a creative generation of intellectuals, publicists and early political leaders appropriated transnational fragments of ideas and adjusted them to political projects which they understood to be consonant with indigenous traditions and sensibilities. The focus of these early liberal accommodations and contestations was the idea of the constitution, the jury as a political form and the free press as an institution. This debate about the constitution of states and empires had itself been galvanised by the wars of the revolution and the autocratic reaction after 1815.

India, Iberian ‘liberalismo’ and the problem of Greece

Maurizio Isabella has recently written of the rise after the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of a ‘liberal international’ of Italian and Greek exiles and activists scattered across Europe and the Americas. But the conflict between liberal constitutionalism and monarchical reaction was also taken up in the Asian colonies of Spain, Portugal, France and Holland. These insurrections merged in turn with the hostility of radical European expatriates and Indian public spokesmen in the port cities to the ‘despotism and monopoly’ of the English East India Company. Chandernagore, close to Calcutta, was the scene of a rising of ‘brief-less barristers’ and unemployed seamen that seemed to Indians to ‘outdo Robespierre’. The liberal pronouncements of the Cadiz and Lisbon constitutions of 1812 and 1822 were spread by newspapers and word of mouth to Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. In Calcutta, a series of public meetings and dinners were held at which the whole range of liberal projects, from constitutional rule in Iberia, through the Italian Carbonari, the independence of Greece from the Ottomans, to the freedom of the Indian press, were debated and endorsed. Rammohan Roy himself hosted several dinners at the Calcutta Town Hall. Following one public meeting the radical Calcutta Journal demanded ‘who shall henceforth say that Public Opinion in India is not favourable to the spread of liberal sentiments in India?’ These meetings were of great intellectual and political significance. They were among the first public gatherings in India at which mixed-race Portuguese, Anglo-Indians and elite Indians were present, along with Europeans. They were certainly the first at which the concepts of Right and Left, of liberalism and Toryism, were applied to Indian conditions and existing Indian debates.